Lost in Transliteration

A Font Book of Squiggles in Tristram Shandy

Laurence Sterne’s serpentine squiggle is an eloquent testament to the limitation of words. The twisting line represents a stick waving in the air to wordlessly communicate the vagaries of married life, relating a thousand syllogisms’-worth of meaning.

It would seem that even a squiggle isn’t immune to the corruption inherent in transliteration. Like a curl of smoke, Sterne’s squiggle changes shape as it traverses edition after edition of Tristram Shandy. We here present a sampling of squiggle incarnations. The whimsical font names are based upon the publishers or translators in question.

Josipovici Touch Light

Routledge Black

Penguin Capsized

Sim Manifesto Thin

Ingold Lines Italic

The novel “conducts an extremely interesting dialogue with silence, continually taking us to the point where language loses its power to communicate and other methods must be employed (by both the author and his characters). When Uncle Toby’s servant draws a diagram in the sand to declare the joys of bachelorhood . . . we recognize that we have reached the boundaries of language, as does Uncle Toby himself: ‘A thousand of my father’s most subtle syllogisms could not have said more for celibacy.”

“Like any other gesture, the Corporal’s flourish embodies a certain duration. The line to which it gives rise is, therefore, intrinsically dynamic and temporal. When, pen in hand, Sterne recreated the flourish on the page, his gesture left an enduring trace that we can still read.”